Explainable differential diagnosis with dual-inference large language models

Automatic differential diagnosis (DDx) involves identifying potential conditions that could explain a patient’s symptoms and its accurate interpretation is of substantial significance. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable diagnostic accuracy, their capability to generate high-quality DDx explanations remains underexplored, largely due to the absence of specialized evaluation datasets and the inherent challenges of complex reasoning in LLMs. Therefore, building a tailored dataset and developing novel methods to elicit LLMs for generating precise DDx explanations are worth exploring. We developed the first publicly available DDx dataset, comprising expert-derived explanations for 570 clinical notes, to evaluate DDx explanations. Meanwhile, we proposed a novel framework, Dual-Inf, that could effectively harness LLMs to generate high-quality DDx explanations. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first study to tailor LLMs for DDx explanation and comprehensively evaluate their explainability. Overall, our study bridges a critical gap in DDx explanation, enhancing clinical decision-making.